Archive for the ‘Biz360’ Category

I often get asked for help with topics – I guess that’s because I have created tens of thousands of topics over the years. For those of you who are new to our Community Insights platform, topics are saved searches. I have compiled a set of general tips on creating topics in the CI application, but these could apply to searching the internet in general.

• While it’s well worth your time to plan the search strategy before actually creating a topic, it’s best not to spend too much time trying to arrive at a search that will give you perfect results the first time around, especially if it’s a concept that you have never searched on before. Start by keeping it general, and then narrow it down for more specific results. (Yes! creating topic search strategy is a fun creative process).
• It’s a misconception that you need to list every possible search term that might yield relevant results. Usually a few good search terms will yield 80% of the results. So rather than trying to find an exhaustive list of search terms, your goal is to find the best search terms.
• The easiest searches are those for brand names – names of companies and products. For example, if you search for Biz360 you can be pretty certain that most, if not all of the results returned will be about the company Biz360.
• Searching for brand names is more difficult when the names are not unique.  For example, if you want results for the auto manufacturer Mini, you would have to use other qualifying terms along with Mini because the word on its own is not unique enough. So don’t run a search for just Mini. You would start by searching for Mini Cooper or Mini AND Car. Once you review a page full of results you will have a pretty good idea if you need to widen or narrow your search.
• Planning for a topic involves identifying the main concepts that you want to search on. Make a list of terms for each concept. Also make a list of excludes.
• Terms could be single terms like Mini or phrases  like Mini Cooper. I’ll illustrate this through an example. Let’s say I want to find conversations about fuel efficiency for the Mini – there are 2 concepts, the Mini and fuel efficiency.

Mini  : Mini Cooper, Mini AND car

Fuel Efficiency : fuel efficiency, fuel economy, fuel efficient, mileage, miles per gallon, mpg, fuel consumption

Excludes : netbook,  desktop,  Mac,  HP,  Apple,  Dell,  mini van

• Run individual searches on each of the terms before running a combined search because it will help you to find:
  • The best search terms (in terms of number and quality of results)
  • Synonyms and other related terms
  • Irrelevant results for which you need to write excludes – here again don’t write excludes for every irrelevant post, only for terms that bring in several irrelevant results.
  • Terms that need additional qualifying terms to produce relevant results
• Once you arrive at the list of the best terms, generalize and remove redundant terms.  For example you may not have to use all the above fuel related terms, just the term fuel may be sufficient.
• If it is a simple concept you could use the Simple interface (both in Google or our Community Insights application). But if there are multiple concepts with complex relationships you will need to use the Advanced interface which allows you to use Boolean operators (AND, NOT and OR) and parentheses to connect the terms.
• It’s always a good practice to preview search results before saving a topic to make sure you have no errors.
• Though building topics is an iterative process, you also need to use judgment about when to stop tweaking a topic because it’s impossible to get only relevant results especially with social media content.
• If you are a Community Insights user and require more specific topic creation syntax in the application, log onto our Support Portal http://ci.biz360.com/support/portal and run a search for Topics to access our Topic Creation videos.

To find out how Biz360 can power your insights, visit us here, or get started here. Thanks for visiting!

We are happy to welcome Puneet Arora to the Biz360 executive team as chief sales officer. Puneet will focus on further accelerating sales for the company into small and medium size businesses as well as large enterprises.

He comes to Biz360 with 16 years of experience. Most recently from Salesforce.com, the industry leader in CRM, where as vice president of corporate sales he built a team which achieved 30% sales growth annually. “The growth of Social Media in CRM is driving the need for solid and innovative technology solutions, especially in social media monitoring. Biz360 has been in the media monitoring business for 10 years, recently expanding their offerings to small businesses to offer a best-in-class solution. I believe it is positioned perfectly for this opportunity,” said Puneet.

Puneet has extensive experience with SaaS solutions, including managing customer success and customer service programs to serve major enterprise client as well as small businesses. Prior to Salesforce.com, Puneet helped BlueRoads, a channel management SaaS provider, double revenues each year for 3 years. Earlier in his career, Puneet helped pcOrder and Selectica through very successful IPO’s.

“We are excited to add Puneet to our team,” said CEO, Brad Brodigan.  “He has built successful sales teams to develop strong relationships through customer relationship management.  His unique perspective will help our clients gain even more value from their social media programs.  He has a track record of success at Salesforce.com and other SaaS companies. We look forward to applying Puneet’s abilities towards further accelerating the market release of our latest generation social media monitoring and engagement platform (Community Insights) as well as the rest of our global media analysis services.”

We are very excited to announce our strategic partnership with Chess Media Group. This partnership combines social media analysis with ROI and strategic consulting is a positive step for both clients and the industry.

As the demand for social media grows, there is an increase in the request to provide accountability and to measure the impact of investing in social media to companies. Social media is a new territory for most marketers and executives with the majority of efforts in the space have been experimental. However, as the case studies for success in social media have materialized, more companies are asking how their social media investments are performing.

This partnership provides the most comprehensive technology to monitor and measure your brand in both traditional and social media combined with the expertise to understand the ROI and real impact of these efforts. Furthermore, this combined solution will help you optimize your social media investment going forward.

Jacob Morgan

Jacob Morgan and Chess Media Group are well recognized and respected social media business advisors. They have provided many companies, small and large, with expert strategy, implementation, and ROI analysis of their social media programs. In addition, Jacob has been named an advisor to Biz360.

Brad Brodigan, Biz360 CEO, mentioned, “Our leading monitoring and measurement technology is a perfect complement to the social media strategy and ROI expertise of Chess Media. We are proud to work with them to leverage our technology and their expertise to better serve the growing customer demand in social media.”

Chess Media Group offers services that enable clients to create and capture the value of social media. Their processes can provide solutions that will optimize the effectiveness of any business’ social media investments. Chess Media also writes a popular blog on social media.

Jacob Morgan believes, “the business intelligence platform of Biz360 combined with our accountable social business approach delivers compelling solutions that will justify and optimize our clients’ marketing investments.”

We look forward to working with Chess Media and our customers.

The biggest mistake I see with inexperienced salespeople is talking too much.

They come in with the idea that to sell, they have to be the one talking. They don’t listen because they’re talking and not asking questions.

An effective salesperson is a detective. To be good at what I do, I need be Columbo. Some of you probably don’t remember the TV series Columbo, but it starred Peter Falk as the title character – an unassuming, humble detective with a keen eye for detail. The series was different from other detective stories because most episodes started by showing the perpetrator committing the crime. The show’s creator described it as a “howcatchem,” rather than a “whodunit.” It centered on Lt. Columbo figuring out who the criminal was by asking questions and examining overlooked evidence.

So the philosophy I impart to my sales team is to focus on being like Columbo.

I investigate an enormous organization and find the person whose business problems I can solve. When I identify the prime suspect, I go in and discover the evidence to see if I can indeed really solve his or her problem.

Telling the potential customer what I think they need at our first meeting is no more beneficial than it would have been for Columbo to tell a suspect his theories before he had asked any questions. There is no humility in that. It would be arrogant to assume I know how to solve problems before I even know what those problems really are.

Instead, I ask potential clients about their businesses, their challenges. I follow up with questions like, “When that happens, what does your department do then?” and “Is there a financial impact?”

A good salesperson’s job is to ask tons of open-ended questions to understand the client’s business – to collect the evidence.

“What’s the impact on your company if you’re not listening to what your current customers are saying? Is that a risk to your business? What kind of risk? Have you had anything bad happen? Have you ever used information like that to improve? What strategies do you have to grow your business? What types of things have you tried?”

On the flip side, when I’m asked a question. I offer massive transparency. Ask me a question, and I’m here to publish it for everyone to see.

Therein begins our relationship, a relationship built on honesty.

Consumers are participating more and at a faster rate on the web than ever before.  Instead of merely being big, the companies that seem to be winning out are those that are the most agile to listen, anticipate and then act on what is being said.

These real-time interactions bring up entirely new issues for companies eager to thrive during a recession.  This is the focus of the Read Write Real Time Web Summit in Mountain View, California on October 15.  Companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and the New York Times will be there.  The conference will be very participatory and will educate you on how you can best adjust to the rapid changes we’ve seen to the web in the past few years.

Biz360’s Chief Marketing Officer Tony Priore will be attending the summit.  Biz360 recently launched it’s new SaaS product Community Insights and will be reporting any news or tips gained.  If you plan to attend, please say hello.

ReadWriteWeb is one of the most influential blogs in social media today. In a time when a lot of companies are struggling to figure out how individual relationships present in social media affect the bottom line, ReadWriteWeb always presents information to help them stay ahead of the curve.

The field of leveraging and fostering these individual relationships via the web is often called Community Management. Many people vow to be experts in the space, but very few of them have been involved in social media as heavily and early as ReadWriteWeb’s Content Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick. I asked for his advice on how companies who may be struggling with social media can get started or become more effective with it:

MICHELLE:
When did you first get involved in social media? How has the social media space evolved since you first engaged in it?

MARSHALL:
I’ve only been doing this for about five years. I came from the nonprofit world and thought social media tools would be good to learn about so I could help bring them into that sector. I blogged as I learned and eventually started getting work blogging, more than the consulting I originally envisioned. When I got involved in all this it was a lot more marginal, we were all very scrappy. There were a surplus of freaks all trying to get or create a relatively small number of jobs in the field. Now social media is far, far more mainstream. Everyone’s more professional and there are far more marketing and PR people involved. On the up side, I did get to meet Neil Young once because of all this. I didn’t see that coming. So I guess you could say it was always weird, but now it’s getting really weird.

MICHELLE:
Blogs and Twitter are integrating marketing, product development, customer service roles for companies into one Community Manager role. In a large company, what is the most efficient way for a Community Manager or Managers to delegate these tasks so as to make the customer happy?

MARSHALL:
I think it’s best for all the traditional roles to stay intact and for a new position to be created that bridges all the different departments with social media as the glue. The Community Manager contributes to almost every department in a company but needs unique social-media specific skills and experience.

MICHELLE:
What steps should companies take to best empower their Online Community Managers to make the best decisions?

MARSHALL:
Let them speak freely in public. Let them spend their time however they see fit, as long as they are getting results. Expect a lot from them but understand the way they are being pulled in many directions on both sides of a wall – inside and outside the company. Understanding their job is helpful. Reading our Guide to Online Community Management is a good way to accomplish that.

MICHELLE:
I find a lot of larger companies’ social media efforts to be somewhat “gilded”, where the negative comments get ignored and the positive comments get rewarded. What are your thoughts on this?

MARSHALL:
That’s probably not a sustainable strategy for too long. Even if you can maintain it for a while – it’s no way to make the most of your engagement with social media. That requires as much authenticity as you can muster, in order to build relationships, in order to harvest the gains. This isn’t just another broadcast medium to push your marketing message through – this is people baring their hearts and minds to each other. (Really!) There’s good business development opportunities there, but only if you connect meaningfully with other people.

MICHELLE:
Can you name a great example of how a company capitalized on an opportunity presented in the social media sphere?

MARSHALL:
Smart people strengthen relationships between themselves and sales leads, vendors, possible hires, analysts, press and other people of business interest through social media all day every day. One of my favorite stories is about Lucia Willow, Community Manager at Pandora. Twitter is larger than Pandora now, but for most of the time she was on the site that wasn’t the case. Lucia says that she’s used every social network out there but Twitter offers her “the best bang for the buck.” When Pandora was facing a possible end to their business because of rising licensing fees, Lucia was able to mobilize scores of people on Twitter to engage with Congress over the matter and pass it on to their friends. It ended up saving not just that business, but potentially many other innovative small companies at risk as well. Twitter users are unusually fast-acting and engaged, Lucia told us. That’s just one of a number of case studies included in our Guide to Online Community Management.

Mark Hopkins is Editor of the tech blog Silicon Angle and the former editor of the social networking blog Mashable. He has built the online communities for Mashable, Blip Media, 5Tribe and Intel.

From the time you were Associate Editor at Mashable to now running SiliconAngle, you’ve followed social media technologies very closely.  How have tools like Twitter made blogger’s voices so much more powerful?